Historic Roads

The Mother Road from Chicago to Santa Monica, established in 1926 and fully paved by 1938. It carried Dust Bowl migrants west, pos...

The first transcontinental highway for automobiles, promoted by Carl Fisher in 1913 from Times Square to Lincoln Park, San Francis...

Wartime road from Dawson Creek in British Columbia to Delta Junction in Alaska, pushed through wilderness in eight months of 1942 ...

The 19th century trade route from Franklin in Missouri to Santa Fe, opened when Mexico welcomed American traders in 1821. Wagons t...

The great emigrant road from Independence, Missouri to the Willamette Valley, walked by some 400,000 settlers from the 1840s. Axle...

The 715 km parkway from Nashville to Natchez following the old Kaintuck boatmen footpath, itself thousands of years old. Kaintuck ...

The Regina Viarum, queen of roads, begun by Appius Claudius Caecus in 312 BC from Rome toward Capua and on to Brindisi. Cut stone,...

The Roman road from the Adriatic at Dyrrachium through Thessaloniki to Byzantium, built after 146 BC on an older Illyrian path. Ar...

The Achaemenid courier route from Susa to Sardis described by Herodotus around 450 BC, with 111 stations and relays. His famous li...

The Inca road system of some 40,000 km linking Quito to Santiago and the Pacific to the high puna, formalized by Pachacuti in the ...

The wartime supply line from Lashio in Burma to Kunming, rushed to completion in 1938 by some 200,000 laborers after Japan cut the...

The Stilwell Road from Ledo in Assam through Myitkyina to join the Burma Road at Mongyu, built by US engineers and Kachin labor in...

The road from Yakutsk to Magadan across the Kolyma basin, built by Gulag prisoners in the 1930s to 1950s. Bones frozen into the pe...

The old cobbled south ramp of the Gotthard pass from Airolo, built from 1827 to 1832 and rebuilt 1951, with 14 hairpin turns of gr...

One of the oldest and longest major roads in Asia, running from Bengal across the Indo-Gangetic plain to Lahore, Peshawar and Kabu...

The longest Roman road in Hispania, running from the Pyrenees down the Mediterranean coast through Tarragona and Valencia to Cordo...